Sustainability/GreeNR; Curative; or Kabuki Theater?

Sustainability/GreeNR; Curative; or Kabuki Theater?

Green New Rochelle, ICLEI, Agenda 21 etc. are nothing more than local organizing angles torn from the pages of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." This is the textbook of New Age societal re-organization for the hordes and multitudes of the disaffected and self-classified 99 percenters poised and ready to inflict a second Great Recession on our nation with a second Obama term of office.

They are ideological crowbars; extraordinary tools for forcing open the ordinary mechanisms of local governance and political reform in our municipality and injecting into them some very serious, long-term revisions and reversals of accustomed democratic practices in our system of representative government.

As a general matter, no one is his or her right mind can be against serious recycling; reductions in packaging and energy utilization, re-use of carbon-based materials like PVC and PET, composting of appropriate materials etc. The point is only that we do not need a "multi-inch" bundle of mundane platitudes and intrusive prescriptions and proscriptions to achieve it.

The Bramsonites, like the Obamadans, want to change our way of living in a radical way; and forever. This is just the most pathetic example of a long-term strategy of societal revolution through our universities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the media and federal, state, county, town, city, village and hamlet bodies. The "housing settlement" presently being imposed on Westchester County by President Obama, Eric Holder and the Justice Department, a Washington-appointed magistrate and a US District Court judge is just another front in the assault on our system of federalism and local representation

As Mr McCaffery points out, GreeNR is also a convenient bit of local political "legerdemain;" the magical distraction of the largely uninvolved and diverted public from the real administrative ineptitude and economic bewilderment that characterizes the regime of New Rochelle's figurehead mayor and highest-paid council person.

And also a nifty play at political "sustainability;" the careful grooming and management of an ambitious political agent's record of "accomplishment." An entire trail of practical inconvenience (recycling regs, disposability strictures, transportation "alternatives" (imposition of underutilized bicycle lanes) etc.). Why not include the latest gratuitous exigency; the move of our sound shore-situated DPW facility to Beechwood Avenue? Surely, an environmental pretext can be added to the previously imagined political and legislative justifications.

All this political "sustainability" to be provided and paid for at public expense of course.